For a quick but deep escape from the grind, you can’t do better than Madison’s Hammonasset Beach State Park. Of the park’s many attractions—the campsites, the boardwalk, the nature center, the salt marsh—the popular headliner is the two-mile western beach, where the sand seems impossibly fine for Connecticut’s often scratchy coast.

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But just to the east, past a thicketed bluff with a walking path and the Hammonasset Point overlook, lies a less celebrated asset: a “boulder lag beach,” where rocks of all sizes congregate like walruses and waves of pink-orange shells break with a crunch underfoot.

Here’s the thing, though: there aren’t that many feet walking on this beach. At least there weren’t on a moody afternoon in early spring, when a plush gray sky gradually glowed amber, then finally revealed its ember heart to an admirer far below.